Number 19

Mark RothkoWW-1949-115544

1949·Oil on canvas·172.8 × 101.8 cm (68 × 40 1/8 in.)

<p>Like many of the New York School painters of the 1940s, Mark Rothko was largely influenced by Surrealism, creating symbolic abstractions comprised of biomorphic and mythological forms. By 1947 he abandoned such suggestive imagery and began working exclusively with how ideas of color, light, and space could be manifested in paint. <em>Number 19</em> follows the characteristic format of his transitional canvases, in which loosely defined shapes hover against a thinly brushed background. Color had become a defining force for Rothko, as had the atmospheric—even ghostly—layering of oil paint, which would lead to his signature color-field of the 1950s.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1949
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 172.8 × 101.8 cm (68 × 40 1/8 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Mark Rothko

Artist

Mark Rothko

Painting

Mark Rothko was a Latvian-Born American abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American abstract expressionism movement of modern art.

Dvinsk, Russia

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